An Obama nomination — after the selective but intentional disenfranchisement of Michigan and Florida, the relentless race-baiting by Obama and his surrogates, and the venom from his supporters — is repugnant to many of us who, to use
Arthur Schlesinger’s phrase, are unrepentant and unreconstructed liberals and New Dealers.
What we are witnessing is nothing short of the breakup of the historic Democratic coalition.
Chris Bowers, Obama supporter and writer at Open Left, dreams of a cultural change in an Obama Democratic Party which is almost a parody of the brie and Chardonnay stereotype:
There should be a major cultural shift in the party, where the southern Dems and Liebercrat elite will be largely replaced by rising creative class types. Obama has all the markers of a creative class background, from his community organizing, to his Unitarianism, to being an academic, to living in Hyde Park to shopping at Whole Foods and drinking PBR. These will be the type of people running the Democratic Party now, and it will be a big cultural shift from the white working class focus of earlier decades.
Further illustrating their break with traditional liberalism,
Markos Moulitsas has declared himself a libertarian Democrat, in other words: a politically correct Republican. These neo-liberals are really proposing a Party run by those who have little need for government and instead focus on identity politics, environmentalism, post-partisan government, and the rejection of
American exceptionalism. The neo-liberals demonize the traditional Democratic base of poor white voters precisely because these voters rely on government and expect their leadership to fight partisan battles on their behalf. They are also deeply patriotic and weary of the moral relativism put forward by the likes of Jeremiah Wright.
Because of Obama’s anemic performances in West Virginia and Kentucky, the campaign and its supporters imagine a new Party.
Sean Wilentz writes
the Barack Obama campaign and its sympathizers have begun to articulate much more clearly what they mean by their vague slogan of “change” – nothing less than usurping the historic Democratic Party, dating back to the age of Andrew Jackson, by rejecting its historic electoral core: white workers and rural dwellers in the Middle Atlantic and border states.
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In whatever form our Party takes, the perpetrators of this breakup are the Obama campaign and the neo-liberals. It’s their demonization of low-income white Americans which is largely the cause of our coalition’s breakup.
Wilentz continues:
Without a majority of those voters, the Democrats have, since the party’s inception in the 1820s, been incapable of winning the presidency. The Obama advocates declare, though, that we have entered an entirely new political era. It is not only possible but also desirable, they say, for Democrats to win by turning away from those whom “progressive” pundits and bloggers disdain variously as “Nascar man,” “uneducated,” “low information” whites, “rubes, fools, and hate-mongers” who live in the nation’s “shitholes.”